[quote="Alex"]
1. I should have done a better job of explaining the benefits of exploration speed in the rules, and making it explicit what the penalties are for not moving at exploration speed. When I run ACKS, characters moving at exploration speed gain the following advantages: (a) because they are watching their footing, they only set off traps on a 1-2 on 1d6; (b) because they are counting paces and estimating distances, they are given explicit dimensions of rooms and hallways and permitted to map their progress; (c) because they are moving cautiously, they are not automatically detected by passively alert creatures; and (d) if Elves or other characters with Alertness they can spot secret doors.
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Thank you for this clarification, Alex! I completely missed the connection between exploration movement speed and the high failure rate of traps; I was just assuming that most traps were unreliable because they depended on people just happening to step on the right stone, and such. I'll clerify this to my players immediately.
[quote="Alex"]
3. The costs of living are not intended to be required in the same way that, e.g., attack rolls are required. Much of the ACKS system is economic guidelines and expectation-setting, not rules-as-physics.
[/quote]
And thanks for clarifying this, as well - It's good to know I wasn't 'doing it wrong.' (I actually find my players spend significantly more on luxuries and living it up than the expected lifestyle costs for their level suggests. I suspect it might be something to do with the high death rate they had for the first few sessions...)
Skimmed through the rpg.net read through (no way I have time to read 4000 posts) ...some interesting discussion, but also I wonder sometimes: Do these people even like playing games? :)
Meaning, at the beginning of a game session, I just want to make an interesting character and play them - I don't worry about what they're going to be at 5th Level compared to some other class I could have picked. I guess we don't do a lot of "meta-gaming"- just make a character and get going - let the role-playing direct the story from there not the rules. We hit a confusing rule - make something up and move on. Actually, much of it is the way most play now ends up being one-shots or very short campaigns, so few of these issues are probably ever going to come into play anyway - we're all married with kids, etc. so a long, multi-year campaign is never going to happen. Ever.
Also - chatted friends today because I saw the "Gamergate" comment - none of us had a clue what it was (even my video game addict friends) - so a non-issue for us. Did make me wonder though: What is stopping Alex from creating another rpg.net account and posting stuff there as "another person"? :)
Anyway, thanks for starting the rpg.net thread - hopefully it will generate more well-deserved interest in ACKS.
Skimmed through the rpg.net read through (no way I have time to read 4000 posts) ...some interesting discussion, but also I wonder sometimes: Do these people even like playing games? :)
Meaning, at the beginning of a game session, I just want to make an interesting character and play them - I don't worry about what they're going to be at 5th Level compared to some other class I could have picked. I guess we don't do a lot of "meta-gaming"- just make a character and get going - let the role-playing direct the story from there not the rules. We hit a confusing rule - make something up and move on. Actually, much of it is the way most play now ends up being one-shots or very short campaigns, so few of these issues are probably ever going to come into play anyway - we're all married with kids, etc. so a long, multi-year campaign is never going to happen. Ever.
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The number of questions I'm asking on these forums tends to be directly proportional to how active the current game I'm running is, and the questions are things that either came up or had the chance to come up but didn't require a ruling on the spot, or the ruling we went with felt weird. We're all adults and are willing to accept the possibility of "hey, we did it this way, but after some advice from the forums, it seems like that will break down farther down the line" and change it.
I can attest to the power of this: we played the Kingmaker pathfinder campaign many years ago, and we used the default PF/3.x assumptions of magic availability and created fairly absurd scenarios pretty quickly. My favorite was when the gunslinger provided dozens of barrels of gunpowder for other members of the party to carry after magic users cast invisibility and fly so that we could stealth bomb some river-ships that were carrying troops towards our capital.
[quote="tgcb"]
Also - chatted friends today because I saw the "Gamergate" comment - none of us had a clue what it was (even my video game addict friends) - so a non-issue for us. Did make me wonder though: What is stopping Alex from creating another rpg.net account and posting stuff there as "another person"? :)
Anyway, thanks for starting the rpg.net thread - hopefully it will generate more well-deserved interest in ACKS.
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Most places on the internet frown VERY heavily upon making alternate accounts, commonly called "sock puppeting", and a statstically significant % of the RPG communityonline will drag your name through the mud if they suspect you are or ever have been a sock puppeteer.
Most places on the internet frown VERY heavily upon making alternate accounts, commonly called "sock puppeting", and a statstically significant % of the RPG communityonline will drag your name through the mud if they suspect you are or ever have been a sock puppeteer.
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Hah. I have an account on RPG.net in good standing - cunning concealed under the username "apmacris". I've known the owner for years and was one of the corporate donors to their recent membership drive. I post on the site as an ordinary citizen on occasional topics of interest, and for the most part no one notices (or says anything if they do notice).
I felt it would be counter-productive of me to post in the RPG.net thread about ACKS primarily because my presence there would create a tendency to inspire questions about me instead of about the game. I think ACKS speaks for itself. I have my politics, philosphies, quirks, and charms, and surely they have affected the game, but the game itself is not allegorical or political.
I felt it would be counter-productive of me to post in the RPG.net thread about ACKS primarily because my presence there would create a tendency to inspire questions about me instead of about the game. I think ACKS speaks for itself. I have my politics, philosphies, quirks, and charms, and surely they have affected the game, but the game itself is not allegorical or political.
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I think that is a good decision to stay away. The game is good and does stand on it's own. RPG net however always has to drag in an author's/creators personal politics that have nothing to do with the product. I've been following the thread since it started and surprisingly it's been really good and is still focused on the game at hand. I'm still surprised it hasn't devolved yet into pointless political bickering.
[quote="Alex"]
It was not my intent that it allowed automatic searching for traps, though it merits playtesting to see if that should be the official rule. It would require some re-engineering of other mechanics, though.
[/quote]
I have the house rule for automatic searching of traps while using exploration speed so long as one PC in the party has a 10' pole out. Without looking into it too closely, I didn't notice the need to re-engineer any other mechanics though, so I'd welcome someone pointing out any obvious issues with this tweak either in this thread or elsewhere.
Traps trigger on a 1-2 for each PC, no? Someone in a party of any size will almost certainly then trigger the hallway trap regardless. So the effect of this rule in play is often to spare the high h.p. frontline PCs a bit of damage at the cost of actually killing the lower h.p. PCs in the middle ranks. The 33% trap is actually deadlier than the 100% trap. That infamous pit trap in the Caverns of Thracia, for example, has only ever killed PCs from the middle or even last ranks in my experience. The 2-in-6 trap has the interesting effect that the front line is not always the most dangerous place to be, a feature I always appreciated about some of Grimtooth's more... creative traps.
Yeah I like reading many RPGNet threads, but it could really do with a RPG Meta sub forum, where all the 'stuff that is not about gaming/games but gamers/writers' bile can be spilled. And I don't have to see it! Anyway I'm enjoying the thread and especially thoughts from thoe who don't really know ACKS
aaaand I'm banned for using the term "newer-edition weenies" to describe my own players. No wonder there are so many designers and bloggers banned from big purple.
edit: just for a day, but honestly shocking what a hair trigger it was over. Honestly I got missed initially and thought about editing my post, I guess I should have!
[quote="Aryxymaraki"]
The best part about RPG.net moderation is that I 100% guarantee you it would have been ignored if you had been commenting on older editions instead :p
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well, volunteer force and all that.
but yeah, if instead of talking about appeasing "later-edition weenies" I had instead suggested not being beholden to "grognard sensibilities" I wonder if I would have evaded his wrathful eye. In fact I wonder if they get pinged every time the word "edition" is used and I could have stayed under the radar by saying "later-era". The mind reels at the possibilities, really.
It was also odd since someone on these forums is also a mod there and was participating. Maybe they have a policy of not moderating threads they participate in.
That's why I stopped visiting that site long ago. I've never been banned but their moderation and forced politics are too much. My eyes nearly rolled out of my skull when I saw that you were suspended over something so trivial. I'm still following the thread though besides this one stupid incident it has been really interesting.
I'm enjoying the lets read, ive picked up a few tid-bits ive otherwised missed reading the rules too :)
Wow, those bans were massivly un-called for, and sounds like the mod didnt even read the posts they were attached to. Especially when I've read far more volitile conversations on there and not a single ban handed out for them.
I like that he got the person who restated Jard's phrase before he took out Jard.
I'm proud of everyone that participates in these forums for keeping this place away from becoming another "Argument Clinic".
I also really like how Harrowed wrote out his example of working the mortal wounds table. Kinda feels like there's a way to goose the table around a bit to support that format/flow.
aaaand I'm banned for using the term "newer-edition weenies" to describe my own players. No wonder there are so many designers and bloggers banned from big purple.
edit: just for a day, but honestly shocking what a hair trigger it was over. Honestly I got missed initially and thought about editing my post, I guess I should have!
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The RPG.net forum has had a history of extremely nasty DnD edition warring in the past. That's why the DnD section was seperated from the general RPG section. The Mods are thus particularly sensitive about the subject.
[quote="koewn"]
I also really like how Harrowed wrote out his example of working the mortal wounds table. Kinda feels like there's a way to goose the table around a bit to support that format/flow.
[/quote]
Thank you. I had to write something like that out to work out how it functioned to my players. I believe I referred to it as Schrodinger's Status.
I think this has some interesting theological implications about gods and divinities in ACKS. Since divine power can be harvested by convincing people to worship a deity, it seems logical to assume that faith is itself what provides the motive energy, and not the deity itself. Likewise, the divine energy from blood sacrifices comes from the creature being killed.
It seems like this implies a world where belief gives rise to the gods, rather than the other way around, and that a god's puissance varies dependent upon their worshippers, and idea I like very much. I've always been a fan of the Terry Pratchett "Small Gods" approach to deities, and think this fits in nicely.
The metaphysics of the Auran Empire setting are, more or less, that physical life creates soul-energy and sustains its coherency, where otherwise it would be drawn off into a collective or world-soul. (You might think of soul energy as a wave that life particularizes). Most living things actually generate a bit more soul energy than they need to maintain the coherence of their own soul, and that surplus can be "spent" on worship, devotion, or magic. When a creature's body dies, its soul begins to reconfigure to transmigrate into another creature (Empyrean) or begins to dissolve back into the world-soul (Chthonic), unless some external method is found of maintaining its coherence. As the soul transmigrates or dissipates it gets harder and harder to resurrect the dead (hence the timeline). A meager amount of the soul does linger in the remains, enough to speak to with Speak With Dead or to use for spell components.
One of the methods of maintaining a coherent or particularized soul is if other creatures send you some of their ambient soul energy through worship of you or sacrifice to you. So, for instance, if Alexander the Great dies, his soul begins to dissipate. But if Alexander is worshipped as a god, that will maintain his soul energy even though his body isn't around to maintain it. If enough creatures worship Alexander, then he'll have enough soul energy to maintain his own existence and have a surplus to use for magic. The implication is that at least some of the gods are actually heroes and kings of the ancient past who were deified and worshipped.
Another method of maintaining a coherent soul is to become undead and drain the life energy of other living creatures, either by eating their flesh (ghouls) or draining their souls directly (wraiths, spectres, vampires, etc.) Or you can seek to preserve the body in a magical way that keeps the soul present even though it otherwise would dissipate (mummies). Note that it's possible to receive soul energy from worship while still alive (a "living god") and while undead.
What is unknown is whether, when a birth occurs, a specific soul is reborn from the world-soul, or whether it the sould dissipates entirely so that new souls are essentially a random collection of soul-energy. The Empyreans believe that souls are kept more-or-less intact in reincarnation while the Chthonic believe its dissipation into nothingness before rebirth. Conflicting interpretations of the facts above lead to the Empyrean and Chthonic theological systems. The Empyreans burn the body and seek to release the soul for reincarnation unless it was so exalted as to deserve worship (Imperial Cult, etc.) while the Chthonic seek to preserve the body and soul in undeath until enough spiritual energy is available to their gods to restore everyone to life (the Awakening).
